Cammie III

Time to try something new. In that Burne Hogarth book I read about something called sculptural light. It’s a light and shade scheme that ignites what the eye can see and all the rules of physics about what light does. Instead you divide the subject up into 3D shapes and assign values based on the angle that surfaces are at. The closest surfaces will all be flat towards you and can be left white; the further away surfaces are and the more they’re sloped away from you, the darker you make them. With this scheme I might just be able to paint fingers by just turning them into sausages and pinging them individually without worrying about the shadows they cast on each other.

This scheme seems especially appropriate for figures, so I went for the inktense pencils. Today’s model is Cammie, making her third appearance.

As starting colours I picked sea blue and paprika. A little experimentation on scrap paper revealed that these might make a green together rather than a purple and this looked interesting. So after putting down a pencil outline, I got to work on all the shapes, leaving them white in the middle, surrounded by the red and with the red and blue in the dark areas. Before wetting I decided things needed brightening, so I added some sun yellow everywhere where the red met the white.

And this is what I got when I wet the marks:

I wasn’t happy with this. The blue was too dark against the other colours and the blue and yellow were screaming too loudly and drowning out the red. So I added another layer of red. This time I used Persian red, a red with a lot more oomph, and added a bit of baked Earth in places for variety. These reds were added everywhere that I’d used the paprika, including over all the blue marks and over lot of the yellow.

I was happier after adding the red and stopped there. It might be the first time I’ve added a second layer in an inktense pencil painting and had it not been obvious to the viewer that I’d done so. And has Cammie picked up some sort of metallic, bronzey effect? Apparently that can happen with this sculptural shading but I’m not complaining. This one feels like a success and it’s going up for sale.